Global trends of ET
New Trends of Educational Technology in the 21st Century Bring your own device Also called bring your own technology (BYOT), bring your own phone (BYOP), and bring your own PC (BYOPC) refers to the policy of permitting employees or students to bring personally owned mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and smart phones to their workplace, and to use those devices to access privileged company information and applications. The term is also used to describe the same practice applied to students using personally owned devices in education settings. Flipped Classroom. Is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed.Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions. The video lecture is often seen as the key ingredient in the flipped approach, such lectures being either created by the instructor and posted online or selected from an online repository. Social Media' ' Social Media tools are tools that allow for social interaction and easy creation of content by users. Examples of popular Social Media tools are Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress and Pinterest. They can be an effective tool for teaching and learning in higher education. It can help connect students to information and help them generate a dialogue with their teacher and other students about a course. It can also help students and faculty build professional networks that connect them to communities beyond the U of S. Digital badges These are a validated indicator of accomplishment, skill, quality or interest that can be earned in various learning environments. Badges as Motivation to Participate One of the ways in which badges are often used is to encourage participation by recognizing the participants. Motivation is often one of the major reasons designers decide to employ badges. Participation is encouraged because badges offer a new pathway of lifelong learning separate from the traditional, formalized academic pathway. Badges highlight and recognize skills and knowledge that come from personal initiative and investigation. Badges as Motivation to Collaborate Unlike most online media, open badge programs are collaborative ones that promote active, engaged involvement. Given more collaboration by an increased number of people, even more solutions, ideas and theories could be presented and analyzed. Badges have the potential to work for any company or online collaborative action system in order to engage more people and motivate those people to participate in online data sharing and social media. Badges “enhance identity and reputation, raising profiles within learning communities and among peers by aggregating identities across other communities... and build community and social capital by helping learners find peers and mentors with similar interests. Open Education Resources OERs 'are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open format to be an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. Open Educational Resources (OER) are digital materials that can be used, re-used and repurposed for teaching, learning, research and more, made freely available online through open licence such as Creative Commons. OER include a varied range of digital assets from course materials, content modules, collections, and journals to digital images, music and video clips. The development a nd promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the ''commodification of knowledge ''and provide an alternate or enhanced ''educationalparadigm. The idea of open educational resources (OER) has numerous working definitions. Often cited is the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation which defines OER as: "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." '''Massive Open Online Course It is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user fora that help build a community for students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs). MOOCs are a recent development in distance education.[1] Although early MOOCs often emphasized open access features, such as connectivism and open licensing of content, structure, and learning goals, to promote the reuse and remixing of resources, some notable newer MOOCs use closed licenses for their course materials, while maintaining free access for students. 'Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games' These are mixes of the genres of role-playing video games and massively multiplayer online games, possiblyin the form of web browser-based games, in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual world. As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a character (often in a fantasy world or science-fiction world) and take control over many of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player online RPGs by the number of players, and by the game's persistent world (usually hosted by the game's publisher), which continues to exist and evolve while the player is offline and away from the game. Collaborative Learning CL 'is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together.[2] Unlike individual learning, people engaged in collaborative learning capitalize on one another’s resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another’s ideas, monitoring one another’s work, etc.).[3][4] More specifically, collaborative learning is based on the model that knowledge can be created within a population where members actively interact by sharing experiences and take on asymmetry roles.[5] Put differently, collaborativelearning refers to methodologies and environments in which learners engage in a common task where each individual depends on and is accountable to each other. These include both face-to-face conversations[6] and computer discussions (online forums, chat rooms, etc.).[7] Methods for examining collaborative learning processes include conversation analysis and statistical discourse analysis.[8] Alternatively, collaborative learning occurs when individuals are actively engaged in a community in which learning takes place through explicit or implicit collaborative efforts. Collaborative learning has often been portrayed as solely a cognitive process by which adults participate as facilitators of knowledge and children as receivers. The concept of collaborative learning, the grouping and pairing of students for the purpose of achieving an academic goal, has been widely researched and advocated throughout the professional literature. The term "collaborative learning" refers to an instruction method in which students at various performance levels work together in small groups toward a common goal. The students are responsible for one another's learning as well as their own. Thus, the success of one student helps other students to be successful. Proponents of collaborative learning claim that the active exchange of ideas within small groups not only increases interest among the participants but also promotes critical thinking. According to Johnson and Johnson (1986), there is persuasive evidence that cooperative teams achieve at higher levels of thought and retain information longer than students who work quietly as individuals. The shared learning gives students an opportunity to engage in discussion, take responsibility for their own learning, and thus become critical thinkers (et al. Totten, Sills, Digby, & Russ, 1991). 'Cloud Application Cloud computing accounting software is accounting software that is hosted on remote servers. Data is sent into "the cloud," where it is processed and returned to the user. All application functions are performed off-site, not on the user's desktop. In cloud computing, users access software applications remotely through the Internet or other network via a cloud application service provider. Using cloud computing accounting software frees the business from having to install and maintain software on individual desktop computers. It also allows employees in remote or branch offices to access the same data and the same version of the software. References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/ http://www.usask.ca/gmcte/resources/teaching/social_media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_badges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/oer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_learning http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game#Common_features http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/cloud_computing_accounting_software.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course